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Developer’s Profile in 2017 By Stack Overflow

It’s always interesting to find out how a typical developer looks like. Especially for those who don’t work as software or web developers. Stack Overflow asked this question as well during their survey for developers.

Stack Overflow is the largest online community for programmers from all over the world. Each month over 40 million users visit Stack Overflow to learn something new and to share their experience. According to Stack Overflow, 16.8 million of these users are professional developers and students of tech courses.

Last year Stack Overflow asked developers about their favorite technologies, work preferences, and professional habits. 64,000 developers took part in the annual survey. The main idea of this survey was to provide employers with the knowledge of who developers are and what they need.

There is a misconception about developers that they’ve been programming since childhood. But actually, there is a wide range of experience levels. The biggest part of developers have their work experience from one to three years. It’s worth mentioning, that there is a significant part of developers (7.5%) who have more than 20 years of work experience.

Years Coding Professionally

On average, web and mobile developers have less work experience than developers of other technical areas like system and database administrators. Among professional developers, 11.3% got their first coding jobs during their first year of learning how to program. 36.9% of developers had learned programming 1-4 years before they started their careers as developers.

Gender

Stack Overflow asked developers about their gender identity. According to the survey, women constitute 7.6% of Stack Overflow’s traffic, that is a good tendency. The similar trend we notice in the Ukrainian IT.

Educational Attainment

As for higher education, among professional developers globally, 76.5% of all respondents answered that they had a bachelor’s degree or higher, such as a master’s degree, professional degree or equivalent.

Undergraduate Major

As for majors, more than half of professional developers (54.2%) who graduated from the university or college, said that they majored in computer science or software engineering. Also almost a quarter of developers (24.9%) major in such related disciplines as computer programming, computer engineering, or information technology.

Other Types of Education

A distinctive feature of many developers and IT specialists is that they like learning and studying something new after they graduate from the university. But what sources do they use for this? 90% of all respondents answered that they’re at least self-taught. Also, half of all respondents (45.4%) answered that they took an online course and 41.2% said they took in-house training.

What Kind of Learning Do Developers Recommend?

To sum up about learning, Stack Overflow asked developers on what kind of learning they would recommend. The majority of developers (64.7%) recommended taking an online course in preference to any other method, followed by reading some professional literature (49.9%) and attending part-time/evening courses (31.9%). Do we agree with this? Totally yes.